Photography: Mark Guest


Charts Children’s bestsellers Slowing pains hit UK market


The kids’ markets on both sides of the Atlantic are sporting a Cursed Child-shaped hole, but the strength of classic titles is spurring both. Tom Tivnan reports


a golden age. The past three years have seen consecutive record hauls through Nielsen BookScan for the sector, with the category going from £332.2m (2014) to £355.5m (2015) to £379.5m (2016). Put simply, the market has never been as buoyant. There has been a bit of a bump in this smooth upward road, however. Sales have slipped 3.8% in 2017, with full-market revenue of £163.4m in the 33 weeks ending 12th August. This is not necessarily disastrous and does not signal the end of the good times: late July 2016 saw the release of J K Rowling, Jack Thorne and John Tiffany’s Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (Litle, Brown) and by this time last year the playscript had conjured up £11.6m on 1.1 million units sold. Yet children’s sales in 2017 were 4% ahead of 2016 prior to the end of July— strip out Rowling from both years’ data and the sector has risen 2.1%. And given that 2017 has an upcoming “event” release of its own—Philip Pull- man’s La Belle Sauvage (PRH/David Fickling, out on 19th October)—there is every reason to believe the market will be back in the black come the year’s end.


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You might argue that there has already been some event publishing with David Walliams, who dominates the UK charts, garnering positions one through four— and eight of the top 15—in 2017 to date. The World’s Worst Children 2 sits atop


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not only 2017 children’s chart. It is also the UK’s overall number one by both volume and value: 15,000 units ahead of second-placed Lee Child’s Night School (Bantam) and £150,000 wealthier than Mary Berry’s runner-up Mary Berry Everyday (BBC). Walliams is certainly valuable to HarperCollins Children’s Books: its 12 top-selling titles of the year were writ- ten by the author, who has generated 42% of its £19.1m TCM income. Though Rowling has not had a new title in 2017, she is having another outstanding year, buoyed by the paperback release for ...Cursed Child and a huge upliſt in sales of her backlist in the wake of the Harry Poter 20th anniversary celebrations. Her children’s


Pictured: children’s megabrand David Walliams top and his illustrator collaborator Tony Ross above


sales are a whisker behind Walliams’, at £8.1m.


The ever-dependable Julia Donald- son—and her army of illustrators, including Axel Scheffler—is right behind Rowling. In fact, just £10,000 separate the two authors’ TCM earn- ings in 2017. Of every £10 spent on kids’ books in the UK this year, £1.50 has gone on a book writen by Walliams, Rowling or Donaldson. Yet the true strength of the UK kids’ market lies in its depth—and this is perhaps the main reason the sector looks so solid despite not yet having a huge, all-conquering hit like ...Cursed


8th September 2017


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